Tag Archives: interview

Herron alumnus Paul Rickey has traveled far and wide and hosted broadcasts on radio and cable television about the visual arts in both California and Oregon since his days at Herron. “I attended Herron from 1949 to 1951 prior to enlisting in the Navy during the Korean War,” he said, noting that he studied with Garo Antreasian. He counts Antreasian, Robert Indiana (know then as Robert Clark, two years ahead of Rickey at Tech High School) and Herron alumnus Hale Woodruff among his “most admired artists.”

“After the Navy, I graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in art education, and I studied at the Art Students League in New York,” he said. Now a resident of Corvallis, Oregon, he teaches and exhibits locally at the Pegasus Gallery and through the Corvallis Art Guild, favoring landscape, portrait and still life work rendered in felt pen, colored pencil, pastels or water color.

He estimates that he’s interviewed “about 150 artists all told, counting years in California and Oregon. “I wanted to support the arts. I wanted to give a place for artists to speak of their concerns about the arts,” he said. “I talk about art movements, famous artists and local art exhibitions.”

His California show, The Arts Scene, was the only one on air in all of northern California” at the time, he said. It ran on Wednesday evenings on KKUP-FM for 642 shows from 1994 to 2001 and online for another five years. The cable Channel 29 show, Focus on Art, is his Corvallis outlet.

Still, after all this time, Rickey fondly insists that he owes “much of my art success to my early training at Herron.”

June 6 was National Doughnut Day, the day when Krispy Kreme gives away donuts, and artisan shops debut a new wacky creation like “zombie donuts” with cheddar larvae. Time Magazine interviewed Dr. Paul R. Mullins, Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, and author of Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut, which explores the pastry as a way to look at the evolution of American consumer culture.

“In pop culture, the donut symbolism begins and ends with Homer Simpson. I suspect he made consumers more receptive to eating donuts because he does what we want to do — owns up to his bodily desires and doesn’t care if he’s carrying a little extra luggage in the center. But we’ve been disciplined to look at donuts as being bad foods, and Homer almost makes them not seem so bad,” Mullins explained.